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Municipal Employee Charged With Hacking City Computer System

San Francisco, CA- An employee of the San Francisco City Municipal Department has been arrested and is charged with hacking into the city database.

Terry Childs, 43 years of age, will plead not guilty when he is arraigned in court today.

He is accused of breaking into the city computers and creating a secret password that allows him full access to the entire City of San Francisco system, giving him exclusive access to nearly all of the data on the SF city system.

He is in jail on $5 million dollar bail, and he refuses to reveal the password that will give full network access back to city employees.

Mr. Childs is an employee who works for San Francisco in the Department of Technology and he was placed under arrest on Sunday and charged with four counts of network computer tampering.

He is accused of preventing authorized users from gaining access to the system and putting into place different barriers to keep them out.

He is also accused of gaining access for himself to vast areas of the computer network that he is not supposed to have access to.

Childs has worked for the City of San Francisco for five years and designed their current router system for the FiberWAN network that they now use.